The article by José Figueiredo Santos analyses the language used by a minister who referred to homeless people as "vagabonds," later corrected to "homeless." The author considers this lexical substitution to be far from a merely linguistic issue, revealing a conception of poverty dangerously close to police logic.
The author argues that the word "vagabond" carries moral judgments that interpret poverty as individual failure, while "homeless" identifies a social condition without attributing a moral identity to the person. When a person without housing is seen as a "vagabond," they cease to be treated as a subject of rights and become an object of surveillance and control.
The article warns of the danger of an approach that transforms poverty into a police matter rather than a social problem. When the response to the presence of homeless people in public space is limited to questions like "how do we remove the homeless from that space?" instead of "how do we solve homelessness?", poverty does not disappear, but becomes less visible.
The author concludes that the debate about language is also a political debate, for words not only describe reality but help construct it. The difference between "vagabond" and "homeless" represents the choice between policing poverty and combating its causes, demanding that individual autonomy be recognised without transforming that autonomy into an excuse for collective indifference.
